Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) firmly positioned himself as the finest Soviet director of the post-War period. But his influence extended well beyond the Soviet Union. The Cahiers du cinéma consistently ranked his films on their top ten annual lists. Ingmar Bergman went so far as to say, “Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.” And Akira Kurosawa acknowledged his influence too, adding, “I love all of Tarkovsky’s films. I love his personality and all his works. Every cut from his films is a marvelous image in itself.”

Shot between 1962 and 1986, Tarkovsky’s seven feature films often grapple with metaphysical and spiritual themes, using a distinctive cinematic style. Long takes, slow pacing and metaphorical imagery – they all figure into the archetypical Tarkovsky film. (Watch the scene from Stalker above.)

You can now watch Tarkovsky’s films online – for free. Each film is listed in our collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. But here you can access the films in the order in which they were made. Most all of the films below were placed online by Mosfilm, the largest and oldest film studio in Russia.

NOTE: if you access the films via YouTube, be sure to click “CC” at the bottom of the videos to access the subtitles.

Hate to tell you but these are NOT public domain or Creative Commons licensed. In the US or Russia. I wish they were, but no.

And some even have Criterion logos. Criterion is not some megacorporation and does the film world great service in preserving such films. Their profitability and sustainabiity margins are not wide. Things like this do their operations harm.

I don’t think anyone is saying that these films are public domain or creative commons licensed. I am assuming that the copyright holder made an agreement with Film Annex to monetize the films through ads. (That is how Film Annex usually does things.) I have asked the company to verify if this is the case. If it’s not, I will let you know. Stay tuned.

I appreciate this director so much especially cause I discovered him by chance (in my uni’s library) and I spent so many hours in the library watching again and again Rublev I even remember quotes (in Russian too). Sabaka!! (the jealous monk to the dog before he kills it…).Not to mention how many scenes are stuck in my mind from that movies (the fire, the young bell maker yelling, the poor jester in the rain, the finale with the orthodox icon montage..). I have watched documentaries about him cause I was curious. He died young but he left us with so much to discuss and think and he did have a voice of his own that I see other directors sort of copy now, dare I say (especially the cinematic poetic device of one scene in slow motion, I think Tarkovsky was one of the first to use it). To me he seems to deliberately urging the craft against any ‘logical’ sequence of storytelling but not cause he wants to appear cool like some todays directors, it was his own genuine way of thinking and practicing art. And he seemed relaxed about the possibility of not being ‘perfect’ (he didnt like his Solaris film). I know nobody alive director who is that down to earth and honest about his own work and cinema in general (Tarkovsky said it is very expensive art). His advice to young directors was ”do not differentiate your work from the kind of life you have”. Tarkovsky’s best movies are about issues he himself understood well (the dying director, the immigrant life, the search for something ‘else’, the reunification with loved ones, so many themes he knew from his own bio). But today you see directors making movies without knowing their subject well, only technical abilities and no intellectual input (talking about contemporary newer German cinema, to give an example). The far east cultures are the only ones producing now any fresh looks on cinematic art.

These films are ripped directly from Criterion DVDs – you can clearly see the logo and this is neither public domain or CC property. People have notified Criterion so I trust they will get in touch with Film Annex and have them removed. In the meantime I think this post should be removed too – advertising illegal rips is surely not the message you’re looking to promote?

wow i wonder if those filmannex people could have come up with an even more giant and obtrusive logo to past in the lower right corner of the screen. i watched about 10 minutes of Ivan before turning it off because of this. what an excellent way of taking a great idea and a ton of work and ruining it!

Hey, Lars and the Some Guy – goshers, you both must be keenly proud of yourselves for your obsessive concern over the protection of Criterion’s copyrights. We sure wouldnt want anyone watching a 45 year old film for FREE when they should be paying studio suits for that privilege. God, we just admire the HELL out of you both!!

Are you both feeling proud enough yet, fellas, or should we send you both roses in gratitude for your crack detective work? Ahh well, Im sure youre already on your way to scanning YouTube for videos to report, so dont let me stop ya, kids. Try not to get your superhero capes caught in your pant zippers, k? ;)

Thanks for posting this. Does anyone know where or how can we get at least English subtitles for Stalker? I wanted to understand anything from what they are saying the the movie does not have subtitles at all…

Don Alex- Criterion are a SMALL, independent company, unaffiliated with any studio, that focuses almost exclusively on costly restorations of niche releases that would otherwise be under-represented or ignored by the mass market.

As an earlier poster said, their operating expenses are high, and their profit margins are low. There’s actually more expense involved in producing a high-quality transfer of a “45 year old film” than most would imagine.

They count on the sales from a handful of popular licensed titles to cover the costs of releasing films that they believe are culturally important, but unlikely to turn a profit.

To brand Criterion as “studio suits” or representatives of “corporate America” is ignorant and misinformed. They are anything but.

This is a great resource, assuming it’s legit or can be made so. Criterion (as well as the other companies distributing these films in the US) do difficult, expensive work keeping this sort of stuff in circulation, and this sort of distribution needs to be approved by them. At the Criterion-associated website mubi.com, there are hundreds of international cinema classics, available to watch, some for free. I’m assuming they’d want these films available for that purpose, but if they’re cool with film annex’s posting them, all the better.

Perhaps ‘Criterion’ will agree the screenings online are for the benefit of all parties involved. Really Criterion does a great job and I have purchased Waida’s ‘Kanal’ from them and am very thrilled with the quality. You know for us old cinema lovers quality is everything cause many times these movies come with bad quality whether in cinema or tv… Here is Criterion’s website http://www.criterion.com/.

I say that because I would like look on the work they do as a public good, and as a service to the intellectual commons. It is a great shame that they have to operate on a commercial model in order to do what they do – there should be arts funding available for the restoration and preservation of our world’s film heritage.

Tarkvsky might have been the best known soviet director but calling him the best would be a huge injustice to all the other great soviet filmmaker such as Ryazanov. People who make such claims know nothing about Soviet cinema.

A Bank account and a house cannot help with appreciating/discovering directors like Tarkovsky and what they thought of cinema. Perhaps the only thing that can help on a free basis is a videotape library (that’s I found about about Tarkovsky like I said). Similarly Film Annex or online sites with films serve like libraries with FREE access where one can explore cinema. Even if someone has a non official copy of a movie produced by Criterion, with the Criterion logo everywhere on it and the problem finding good versions of old movies, even a ‘pirate’ would consider it best to buy a criterion dvd than get more illegal copies… Criterion, besides, caters for the minority of movie goers and dvd shoppers (the ones who care for old cinema,, which aren’t as many as those who care for latest Hollywood) and therefore ANY sort of projection of ‘old’ classics would help the public know about them and become Criterion’s clients… Hence, even if it is illegal, Criterion still benefits and it would have been actually a shame for Film Annex to show them online without Criterion’s logo (they give credit). It’s all good and for the benefit of Criterion and such companies in a way…

That’s pretty immature. There are viable models coming into existence for the distribution and monetization of content which don’t rely on the property analogy.

For movies that would otherwise be out of circulation, like this one, the model can be a bit different again to the ones that try to incentivize the production of content.

Bank accounts, cars and private property cannot be multiplied recursively and distributed at almost zero cost. There are certainly hard problems to be solved in the future with how to continue to incentivize the production and preservation of content, but antiquarian attitudes and smartass rhetorical points don’t address that at all.

FD, that’s absurd. The contents of a bank account can indeed be multiplied recursively and distributed at almost zero cost. It’s called counterfitting. Copyright holders are not the only ones who store the value they build up during a lifetime of labor into “artificially scarce” instruments. Everyone who has ever toiled at a job in exchange for a paycheck has done precisely the same thing. Moreover, there is nothing “artificially” scarce about the allotment of time, health, and creative energy that is granted by nature to each person who produces creative work. The fundamental issue here is not “incentivisation.” It is the question of justice: If one man or woman invests time and labor to create something of value, is it just for someone else to take it for free, simply because they can?

The fundamental issue is incentivization. The jurisprudence of copyright law justifies the grant of a commercial monopoly in an intellectual work explicitly in order to incentivize the production of intellectual works. That is the whole reason we have copyright law.

There is no robust case in favor of intellectual property that relies solely on justice. Justice only comes in granted that there are commercial actions being performed on intellectual works.

The argument goes (went):

IF there is going to be commerce in intellectual goods THEN it is just that the author has a monopoly on those goods.

But if there is no longer commerce in intellectual goods, there is no purchase for an argument for fairness or justice. People cannot have an arbitrary prima facie right to police the actions performed on intellectual works after they are out of their hands. We could arbitrarily stipulate an infinite number of possible rights besides copyrights that authors might have been given over their works if the conditions in which copyright was born had been different, and lament the “injustice” that they do not presently have those rights. The only reason people are disposed to think of this issue as a question of justice is because we are used to the idea of having a copyright.

If people can have no commercial expectation from the sale of their works, because of the changed nature of the economy of information, then they probably shouldn’t accrue costs in time health and energy doing unpaid work. Contrary to your portrait of the persecuted author, anyone who continues to have an expectation of financial gain from intellectual labour in a world where copyright law has become (much more than today) utterly ineffectual, is being foolish and irresponsible. It is simply financially unwise. And if it’s financially unwise, most people won’t do it. So it really does come down to incentivization. Such a world would have only those artists that can support their creative endeavors themselves.

Thankfully, that’s not where we’re headed, and it’s not what I’d suggest. I think the landscape will probably change a lot, and copyright will become less integral to a business model based on intellectual works, but it’s pretty obvious that there are still ways to monetize this stuff very effectively, and remunerate authors, thereby incentivizing their labour. It’s likely that there’ll be a digital age analogue of copyright, which grants rights to shares of a public fund proportionate to the popularity of a work. It would be beneficial to try and implement a model like this sooner rather than later. The conservatism of the content industries is delaying that.

So in answer to your final question, besides it being illegal, and there being a moral obligation to obey the law, I do not see any prima facie injustice in the infringement of copyright.

Kopimi;
The file-sharing debate is hereby buried. When we talk about file-sharing from now on it’s as one of many ways to copy. We talk about better and worse ways of indexing, archiving and copying, not whether copying is right or wrong. Winter is pouring down the hillside. Make way for spring.

More absurdity. By your logic someone could crank up the counterfeiting machinery to full steam and there would be no “prima facie injustice” in deflating the life savings of people who had toiled for decades to save the currency in a bank account or under a mattress. Rights exist to protect individuals from the tyranny of the mob. Your insistence on framing the issue through the concept of “incentivization” is a classic example of the mentality of the unjust: You treat people as a means to an end (in this case, the means of producing the cultureal works you want to consume) rather than an end in themselves.

There is considerably more justificatory weight behind the maintenance of a national economy, and the prohibition of forgery, than there is behind the defense of copyright. Society does not grind to a halt if artists are no longer given an incentive to produce work.

Your analogy is false, but to it I offer another one. The outlook you profess would have us prohibit the availability of the electric lightbulb because justice demands that the chandler is owed a living.

The traditional jurisprudence of copyright law, and indeed patent law too, frames the law in terms of incentivization. I’m not choosing to frame it that way. That’s the way jurists have since the Statute of Anne. If you have a conceptual problem with that, it is entirely yours.

A person of conscience is mindful of the lives of anyone affected by any transaction. The fact that you would consciously deny economic justice to a group of people whose products you enjoy is contemptible. My analogy of currency counterfeiting was right on the mark; the reason people don’t stand for counterfeiting is that currency value affects virtually every person on the planet, while only a minority are protected by copyright laws — a minority vulnerable to exploitation by the majority who are consumers. Your analogy of the candle maker/lighbulb is a pure idiocy, and exposes an inability to reason. We are not talking about a group of people whose products have become obsolete by a new technology; we’re discussing the rights of a group of people whose products are still very much in demand and can now be readily stolen due to new technology. I can forgive stupidity, FD, but not the willful denial of justice to people other than yourself. This conversation is over.

Mike,
This conversation isn’t over. In the last decade, copyright welfare has suffered its greatest blow. Despite draconian laws passed at the start of last century, copyright welfare must face the realities of a capitalist competitive society. Were it for people like you, industry could never renew and we’d be stuck with the horse drawn carriage. It’s only fair, hypocrite.

I don’t deny economic justice to anyone. I think the equation is clear. If there is no hope of remuneration for the production of cultural items – if that expectation is unjustified, don’t bother making them. Find some other way of earning an income. That’s the best way not to be exploited. That’s how a free market works.

Just to puncture your hysterical rhetoric: copyright infringement is not theft. Theft is a crime. Piecemeal infringement is a tort. Tort is addressed not by prosecution but by litigation. It is a civil matter.

Ignoring the technicalities for a moment, it isn’t a theft in commonsensical terms either. It is not an “unlawful taking” because it isn’t taking. It’s copying. Nobody gets deprived of the item on which the infringement is performed. It’s importantly different from theft, and those differences speak to the very origins of copyright law, its involvement in the economics and metaphysics of intellectual works, and the difficult situation we find ourselves in now. To ignore them is to risk being whipped up by industry propaganda into a moralistic frenzy. Clearer thinking here is what is needed, and the license to consider the topic from as many angles as possible, and not to rule out innovative ways of thinking about it as “stupid,” indicative of a lack of “conscience,” “contemptible.” That’s just an immature way to have any discussion.

Finally, I can hold my breath for your forgiveness. Your forgiveness for having enough respect for you to discuss an important issue with you over an internet comment stream. You have to forgive me because I dare to disagree with you, and speak my mind about it. LOL

I doubt there is no problem for Criterion having these free to view online. The main point of their DVD releases is the quality & often excellent extras. This online stuff doesn’t come close to the quality of the DVDs. This is great reference material & might pull a few people new to these films who should go & buy the DVDs to see them in their full beauty.

Considering Tarkovsky’s been pushing daisies for a damn long time, I think it’s pretty funny to see people argue which team of lawyers should reap the benefit of work they didn’t do, and are probably younger than most of the films by Tarkovsky. Bunch of necrophiliacs.

There are some works that should definitely be able to be viewed by everyone without cost. Tarkovsky’s films are important and timeless works of art that should be experienced. I’m sure Criterion will be fine, even with these available to watch online for free.

Hi,
I ordered the DVD awhile back from Amazon though it’s not meant to be available until August. Is this the same release? The reason I ask is that if you follow the reviews on Amazon, you’ll see that a lot of people were very upset with the quality and the fact that the movie had been brutally edited. BTW, it’s being sold by ‘Indigo Starfish’, is this same release?

Made during Communist USSR era. No Copyright. State owns it all. But distributers may have rights to international distribution.
These would be akin to all the art and media owned/made by the U.S. government. It is not copyrighted (all U.S. citizens own it) but, the Smithsonian, LOC, etc. may give the right to distribute work. This is why you will see photos and posters of WPA photographers for sale. Anyone can just download a high resolution TIFF of the same image and send it off to be printed at Costco for a few bucks.

Sounds really awesome. Tarkovsky has been a great servant to Cinema, one who single-handedly changed its face for the better. I myself have been a great fan of his oeuvre and he’s been a great source of inspiration behing my movie-review blog ‘A Potpourri of Vestiges’. Please follow the link to checkout my review of Stalker:

FD argues that copyright is a null idea in terms of getting artistic labour paid for. It seems that if (in the present day) artists choose to work for nothing (because their output will not be paid for) then they are being socially irresponsible. These arguments may well be logically consistent (personally, I reserve judgement) but why should we desire a society based only on logical consistency?
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any historical examples which demonstrate one of FD’s stated, underlying premises: that society will not collapse if artists cease making art.
It’s ironic that FD is able to demonstrate such self-importance precisely because of the persistence of art and, thus, those parts of the blogosphere dedicated to it.

@TheMillionMen… Exactly. I’ve never read such smug remarks as from FD. Dismissing artistic innovation from the copyright infringement argument is not only adolescent, its unethical. It’s always the non-creative types who find it so easy to break out the lawyer-speak and to casually shrug off the energy, time and resources dedicated to a film’s creation, distribution, preservation, sometimes restoration. Free copyright defenders are mere consumers and want nothing to impede that “right”.

Consider this: I value the work of Criterion in making important films look their best. I own several of their DVDs. Now, I currently have no way to see Tarkovsky’s films but by the links provided (when they were functioning and fee-free) and I haven’t the disposable funds to just buy his films on DVD sight unseen. I’m many years out of film school and live where there are no art houses or video rental shops. 85 to 90 percent of the time, I buy DVDs only if I have previously seen and enjoyed a film through some other means. Take away the opportunity for someone like me to see films like these for free and I more than likely will never be buying DVDs of those titles in the future. No money will ever go to any directors, lawyers, studios or Criterion at all. An opportunity for profit is lost due to shortsighted punishment of choosy/frugal potential customers and the websites they favor.

tl;dr: Self-appointed copyright snitches may be doing everyone a disservice despite their intentions.

Criterion or Not: the YouTube version linked to is in no way equal in quality or definition to the DVD, has no subtitle or language menus, hence it serves as an inducement to go to your friendly neighborhood Public Library and Make You Own Rips!!!

Tarkovsky was scrupulous that his films be watched in a cinema – this is a pretty poor way of watching them. If you want to watch great films you should get a projector and a screen (or project them on a wall) – dead cheap these days, I have had one for years. The box set was only £12 (cheapskates could find other means).

^As if you can’t hook up your pc to your HDTV. It’s what a do, but I never usually watch films on youtube unless they are uploaded at the highest quality available. Hell, I’ve seen videos on youtube that look better than certain videos on Netflix. It’s ridiculous.

Without joining the discussion on free-screening vs the interests of Criterion, I only wish to say that Tarkovsky’s access to and mastery of sub-consciousness is astounding and for me he is the best film-maker ever in my life time.

What’s interesting is that Criterion, for fairness, should be compensated even though they don’t hold the copyright! The fact is that copyright – not the right to associate one’s name with one’s work, but the right to treat a creative work like a side of beef – is nonsense, and has results counter to those which I’m sure *all* parties to the debate want, that creative people should feel rewarded for the work they do, that a good living be had, but at the same time their work get to the community as cheaply and widely as possible. Copyright was a cynical historical accident. Perhaps we could consider other models. How, for example, are academics rewarded?

There was no copyright in the USSR, because every creator/author/performer (at least those who were accepted by the system) was receiving a paycheck from the government. In the modern world, people somehow seem to expect that most artists should produce their work for free. That’s simply disrespectful. The main problem with copyright, as I see, was/is that most of the revenues were received by those who had way less to do with the production of the work than the artists themselvs – such as RIAA, etc. The electronic media now offer a variety of means to promote one’s work, such as indie labels, personal websites, etc. If you want, you can put out your work for free using a creative commons license or what have you. But I don’t think one should be shamed if one chooses to sell one’s work and protect one’s copyright, if one wants to.

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) firmly positioned himself as the finest Soviet director of the post-War period. But his influence extended well beyond the Soviet Union. The Cahiers du cinéma consistently ranked his films on their top ten annual lists.

Tarkovski in the Andrei Rublev character make feel us most of the themes that he has always passion. Andrei Rublev is an unforgettable character about freedom and searching himself(includes loosing and finding),reaching competence in the art with maturing of soul, interrogating himself with consuming all the possibilities and living the spiritual satisfaction. He’s a complicated soul/On the way of wisdom he never easily escape and he carries all his life the motto of”KNOWLEDGE BRINGS SADNESS”. He’s an exiciting character that you will understand his decisions on his own way are very fiting and poetical.

Stalker is not watchable on a ipad; the error message says something like “not viewable on a portable device” and recommends you put it on your to-watch list and later wach it on a computer … Of course, sound doesn’t work on my computer… ><

The point of said restriction is that it’s a disgrace to watch his work on a ipad. It is no one’s fault but your own that the sound on your computer does not work. Watch it the way it was intended rather than on a fucking ipad. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0

with high quality headphones a retina iPad is great way to watch movies. In a dark room, the proximity and definition equate a larger screen further away. Try it. A great film is still great seen this way. It takes only a few seconds to get lost in the world.

Re: The point of said restriction is that it’s a disgrace to watch his work on a iPad.

I can’t think why. It is quite possible to get a better visual experience from a good quality digital source, viewed on a recent (higher resolution) iPad, than from many of the prints shown in cinemas. The same is true of the sound.

Between the whining about the presumed copyright infringements, the hand-wringing over the fate of Criterion, and the diktats about how one ought to view his films, I’ve almost been put off watching anything by Tarkovsky again. What a precious bunch of people.

It is a great film, indeed!nnnAndrei Tarkovsky (1932 – 1986), who had firmly positionednhimself as the finest Soviet director of the post-War period, incorporated the most tragic moments of his life experience into a stream-of-consciousness-like manner of narrating a story of his life, which he himself increasingly viewednas devoid of any meaningful narrative of a story, in a film, which he called a nightmare.nnnThe Mirror is a film about the final hours of the author u2013 a dying man in his forties u2013 that are being spent in hallucinations about his childhood and his mother, about himself as a child and a grown man, and about his lover. nnnThe brightest moments of his life werenfloating across his mind where he could no longer distinguish between himself as the child and as the father. He could no longer distinguish between his mother, his wife, and his lover. All became one. Everything was interminglednand confused.

I could not get the subtitles…but Tarkovsky was top class when it comes to filmmaking, and I do not think he would mind one bit that his films are out in public domain for ‘free’. He was quite simply a genius.

Cool old films, i wouldnt pay to watch one outside of a film festival. I hate copyright, it means monsanto can make gm crops in its psychotic attempt to control agriculture, medicine makes treatments because they pay longer than cures and poor get stuffed, copyright is actually ripping everyone off, its intensly structurally toxic part of our world and any intelligent argument for it continuation in its current form is untenable, it has to go.

I am also very interested to know if they are subtitled in Spanish. I know it’s not the same than seeing and listening in the original language, but I need spanish subtitles until I learn a little more English :)
Thanks in advance!

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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.